Secondary menu

You are here

Manitou

Bold Technologies has launched its new cloud-based automation platform, Manitou Cloud Services, and is working to add 30,000 accounts to it by the end of the year, Rod Coles, Bold’s president and CEO, told Security Systems News.

Designing the service to be UL compliant was the company's top priority, Coles said, and it is currently in the process of attaining that certification.

Coles said the release of Manitou Cloud Services was sooner than he expected and credited a rise in consumers’ confidence in cloud-based systems. “Hosted solutions seem to have a better reliability than individual service because they have so much redundancy.”

“The first installations will be on our existing Manitou platform,” Coles said, but the cloud automation will also be ready to use Manitou Neo, the next version of Bold’s central station automation, to be released in 2016. Coles estimated its release to be around ISC West 2016.

Bold first talked about the service at its annual Users’ Group Conference in early August, Coles said, and now has a couple of clients transitioning.

Bold has experience with hosted services, according to Coles, through similarities with the company’s disaster recovery center—a separate cloud-based center that Bold has been offering for years.

The cloud center will be based in Colorado Springs, Bold’s hometown, because of the area’s small risk for natural disasters and its location between both coasts, the company said.

Manitou Cloud Services can make operations easier for Bold users, according to Coles. “We’re getting to the stage now where people [have] to replace their hardware, every few years. They're also having to employ staff to look databases, to look after operating systems to make sure that these things are running 24/7. All of these [issues] go away when you have a hosted solutions.”

Bold Technologies, a central station software provider based here, has hired 14 people in the last eight months, company president Chuck Speck told me, more than doubling its standard rate of five or six new employees per year.

“Most of [the employee growth] is spurred by bringing new customers on,” Speck said. Bold added staff to its new fulfillment department, which works on implementation with new customers, he said.

The fulfillment department was started out of continual customer growth, Speck said. “We’ve put on about 60 new central stations a year … [for] around 8 years. You have to grow your infrastructure to support that kind of growth.”

Bold will soon reach a total of 61 employees, Speck said, already surpassing the company’s one-year goal of 60, set in January. Seven of these employees were added in the last five weeks, and only two of the newest 14 hires were replacements, Speck said.

“The industry is changing enough that there are new needs in the industry,” Speck said. He cited cybersecurity and home automation as examples.

“Cybersecurity is now one of our newest forays,” Speck said, mentioning Manitou’s integration with WebProtectMe, announced at ISC West 2015. It allows central stations to monitor Internet activity for residential customers, alerting them if users such as children access unauthorized sites or chat rooms with known predators.

The WebProtectMe integration has been submitted for an ESX Innovation Award, Speck said.

Bold addresses home automation through partnering with White Rabbit Electronics, a home automation company founded by Speck and Rod Coles, Bold’s CEO. Through integrating Manitou with White Rabbit’s Smart Hub, linking the platform with the company’s entire line of products. “Bold’s integration with White Rabbit is one that we’re very excited about,” Speck said.

LANCASTER, Pa.—Security Partners installed the Bold Manitou platform with the CSS Aeonix Telephony and SecurVoice call recording platform at two of its operation centers, based here and in San Antonio.

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.—Bold Technology executives Rod Coles and Chuck Speck today announced that they’ve launched White Rabbit Electronics, a new company that enables a central station to deliver the “connected home.”

Security Partners has hired Richard Bosley III, formerly of AlarmWATCH, to be its new operations manager, a position in which he will oversee the company's development in the wake of acquiring its second central station.

Bosley held multiple positions over an 18-year stint at his former company where he said, at one time or another, he worked “every position,” doing everything from service calls, IT and data entry to marketing and dealer support.

Bosley said his top priority at Security Partners remains on track: to get the Lancaster central station and the San Antonio facility, which it acquired in August, “fully, 100 percent hot redundant.” This involves switching both centrals to the Tadiran phone system and adding Bold’s Manitou servers to the San Antonio central. The two-fold process is scheduled to be completed sometime in January.

Beyond the primary goal of redundancy, Bosley hopes to use his experience in a diverse range of positions to strengthen the critical relationships between Security Partners and its dealers, and between dealers and end users. “When [dealers] grow, we grow,” he said, adding that Security Partners plans to “refocus the central station to give some customer service training and backup support, and be able to offer services that Security Partners might not have thought about in the past.”

Another major area of emphasis, he said, will be helping dealers grow and market themselves, thereby forging stronger relationships with customers. “If you’re not reaching out to your customers we almost guarantee another alarm company is,” Bosley noted. “We really want to help dealers become more acquainted with end users instead of just installing alarms and collecting checks each month.”

LANCASTER, Pa.—On the heels of acquiring its second central station in San Antonio, Texas, Security Partners has integrated automation software from Bold Technologies into its central station here. The move further strengthens the company’s redundancy capabilities.

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.—Bold Technologies is rolling out software that will allow customers to monitor traffic on Twitter and other social media sites, potentially opening the door to a new revenue stream for central stations